So impossibly overgroomed were the members of Army Of Lovers that they managed to look airbrushed, in the flesh.
Exemplars of the peerless genre of Swedish pop-dance - a nation-specific subgenre which includes Aqua and Roxette and makes everything else in the epileptic world of Europop look and sound like Sade Unplugged by comparison - Army Of Lovers burst onto the scene in the late 1980s like an exploding vat of liquid eyeliner to score chart hits with songs like Crucified and King Midas, which I can remember dancing to several times as it was invariably the final song played every Saturday night at DJ Station in Bangkok (the video clip - above - aired on a giant screen that lowered dramatically out of the roof to screams and squeals from many in attendance).
A fascinating trio: former hooker Alexander Bard graduated from the Stockholm School of Economics and now tours the European lecture circuit speaking about the social implications of the interactive revolution, Jean-Pierre Barda (lead singer) is a make-up artist and Rasputin lookalike who has worked for Her Majesty the Queen of Sweden and has hosted television programs like Rik Och Berömd (the Swedish “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous”) and Miss Sweden 2002, and Camilla Henemark, who runs her own modelling agency and has left and rejoined the group several times after several well-publicised fights with other members.
Here’s Crucified, which was number one for eight weeks in Europe during 1991:
Here they are performing Crucified live on Russian TV:
When promoting their movie Flex, Falcon Studios asked:
“What goes down in Kane O’Farrell’s Gym? A little bit of working out … and a whole lot of sex!” Now, Kane (aka Jarrett James, a fitness trainer based in London) has unveiled his real-life 3-week workout program. The full instructions are below, and they aren’t for the lethargic. In fact, there’s a whole fucking lot of working out, and no sign whatsoever of any actual fucking.
Jarrett recommends up to 8 meals a day, with not a single one containing any fat, sugar or salt. I’m presuming alcohol is completely banned too, so this regimen is certainly not for me. Oh, and the “3-week” part doesn’t mean that you only have to commit for three weeks to end up looking like the star of Cross Country and Bootstrap. It’s a three week program, repeated every three weeks, for the rest of your days on the earth or until you stop caring about your appearance - whichever comes first.
On the plus side, you do get Thursday and Sunday off, and you can end up looking like this:
It’s 2010 - the concept of taking full responsibility for your sex life is getting through even the thickest of gay skulls but Barbra, as usual, was way ahead of the game.
You can hear Her point of view on the matter in this overwrought scene from 1987’s Nuts, where (as top-shelf call girl Claudia Draper (wtf?)) She blindsides her passive lawyer (Richard Dreyfuss) to command the courtroom and convince the judge that she isn’t Yentlmental.
CLAUDIA: So don’t judge my blowjobs - they’re SANE! I knew what I was doing every goddamn minute and I’m responsible for it. I lift my skirt, I’m responsible. When I go down on my knees I. AM. RESPONSIBLE.
Randy Blue’s king stud Chris Rockway is gorgeous. He’s not the Joey Stefano that he may think he is or that Randy Blue may like him to be, but he’s a charismatic performer whose mechanic’s physique, unique moaning style and tender attention to his eager partners has gotten me over the line on several occasions.
However, he has jazz hands - he does! Just look at these examples, stills from Randy Blue movies he’s appeared in:
Australia, 1971
Director: Ted Kotcheff
Stars: Donald Pleasence, Chips Rafferty, Gary Bond, Jack Thompson
Convicts were sent to Australia for the term of their natural life and there was real truth in sentencing in those days. The journey to the ‘land beyond the seas’ took eight months and if they survived that, they could build a colony under the lash and the blistering sun or escape into an endless desert filled with deadly spiders and snakes.
Little has changed in the 200 years since, with 99% of Australians crammed into the fertile coastal slivers on the east and west of the continent, while many British backpackers and the occasional baby never return from ill-fated journeys into the mysterious, vast interior.
Long before Tourism Australia joined forces with film makers and movies like Crocodile Dundee and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert made the Outback cute, the films of the first Australian New Wave like Picnic At Hanging Rock, Wake In Fright and The Last Wave reflected the Outback in all its malevolent glory. Wake In Fright is new to DVD after a surviving print of the ‘lost film’ of Australian cinema was discovered in a recycling container in a Pittsburgh factory in 2004 and given a brief theatrical re-release in Sydney and Melbourne in 2004.
In Wake In Fright John Grant (Gary Bond - Silence of the Lambs fans will note the character name) is serving out a bond to the Department of Education to pay back his teacher training debt by teaching several years in a drab Outback town. Finally granted some Christmas leave, he aims to head for Sydney via the bush plane out of Bundanyabba, a rough as guts place full of hard working, blue-singlet-wearing blokes whose veins run clear with beer.
Grant loses all his savings on a game of Two-Up and falls into a set of threatening misadventures with a violent trio and the alcoholic, slightly mad local doctor known as Doc (Donald Pleasence). After a brutal all-night kangaroo hunt that forced the film makers to add a cruelty to animals message at the beginning of the closing titles Grant and Doc have what appears to be a very drunken male-male sexual encounter.
The poster above for Dunno Y … Na Jaane Kyun (Don’t Know Why) from Indian director Sanjay Sharma is now on display out front of many of India’s countless cinemas in preparation for its May release in a country where even heterosexual kissing is considered taboo (just ask Shilpa Shetty, the Indian actress whose career almost ended immediately amid public furor about obscenity when Richard Gere kissed her on the lips at an AIDS fundraiser in New Delhi in 2007).
India’s High Court overturned laws against homosexuality last year.
“At the moment I’m not thinking about any political or censor problems,” Sharma told BBC Asian Network.
The movie has already been nicknamed “India’s Brokeback Mountain” which may be a good thing or not, but controversy is sure to ensue when the film opens since gay life and gay relationships are not really publicly discussed or treated by the Indian media.
However, “I’m not afraid of anything,” Sharma said. “I stand by my conviction.”
The film stars Maradona Rebello, below, who previously starred in Pankh, which introduced a couple of gay characters to Indian moviegoers but didn’t feature anything like the explicit sex and kissing scenes in the upcoming Dunno Y.
The ultimate motherfucker, Norman Bates debuted 50 years ago in Psycho (1960) a film that still, today, finds its only real competition in the three other films that came out of Alfred Hitchcock’s Navratilova-like run of form that started with Vertigo in 1958 and North by Northwest in 1959 and ended with The Birds in 1963.
With thanks to my friend Dick (not quite his real name), I discovered this unique gay porn scene.
In it, a cute young blond wishes his clown/mime sex fantasy into life when a gyrating guy wearing heavy pancake makeup appears from a cloud of helium balloons to strip, suck and fuck (without taking any of his makeup off. And, he uses his clown facial expressions and mime hand movements throughout).
Both guys are quite hot and the mime especially has a really nice dick but I’ve never found mimes or clowns sexy in the slightest and my mind just goes off into so many different places here. The creepy milieu with its carnival paraphernalia and a lurking masked man gyrating to metronomic synthesizer/drum-machine music is like something you’d find deep inside Buffalo Bill’s house in The Silence of the Lambs, and while the younger guy is reminiscent of Morten Harket from A-Ha, the clown guy looks a little too much like Madonna in her True Blue period (especially in the sequence 8:08 - 9:05) and this is, of course, very distracting.
I’d also like to know what he uses on his lips to not have any of his black lipstick rub off onto his partner’s cock or arse despite providing an extended period of rimming and head:
My darling/s is/are back with a look at Bette Davis’ role in The Letter which Steve Hayes rightfully believes should have won Davis the 1940 Best Actress Oscar (which would have been her third). As always, Steve runs us through a kaleidoscopic mini-encyclopaedia on Davis and The Letter before dropping into character as Davis herself - it’s just great.
Alas, Davis lost that year’s Oscar to Ginger Rogers, who as everyone knows gave her best performance not in Kitty Foyle for which she won but in Vivacious Lady which peaks with this scene:
United States, 1991
Director: Kristen Bjorn
Stars: Sean Davis, Dex Brown, Root Calahan, Ian Layman, Ned McCabe, Blue Vainer, Hogan Malony, Demetrios Xenos
According to a book about him, gay porn director (and former star) Kristen Bjorn said that when he left school his dream was to become “a photographer for a magazine like National Geographic. I wanted to travel across the world and photograph people. I was really very interested in different cultures.”
Born in London and renamed by Falcon Studios for what they mistakenly believed was his resemblance to Swedish tennis champion Bjorn Borg, Kristen Bjorn (pictured left) lived in Brazil, then Australia and is now based out of Spain. His (place)name-dropping body of work includes titles like Carnaval in Rio, Manhattan Latin, Montreal Men, The Caracas Adventure, The Vampire of Budapest, Hot Times in Little Havana and the Australian trilogy A Sailor in Sydney, Jackaroos and Manly Beach.
Kristen Bjorn had a real knack for staging excellent sex scenes starring naturally spunky men who had little or no experience in porn, but his action scenes were all invariably staged in generic outdoor locations or well-lit kitchens and bedrooms and so really they could have been set anywhere - or nowhere.
So, despite his globe-trotting imagination, Kristen Bjorn’s gay porn work doesn’t really delve into the possibilities of his exotic locales and the two-dimensional set dressing of his movies is broad-stroke Orientalism at its worst.
Manly Beach is narrated by a man who speaks with an Australian accent that’s as dry as a ditch and as varied and engaging as the slowly blinking eyelids of a frill neck lizard. Do people really think Australians talk in such a slow-motion, genteel drawl?
Most Australians I know - including myself - talk so fast and pepper their speech with so many expletives that even other Australians can barely understand them. This half-dead-blowfly-on-a-hot-summer’s-day monotone isn’t really the norm, though our current deputy Prime Minister (and hopefully future leader) Julia Gillard holds the Great Australian Drawl fort with admirable pride:
The Naked Civil Servant is the best and funniest TV drama ever made. And I’m sorry, but it’s a scientific fact.
And like its subject it could only have been made in the UK. Even if Quentin Crisp said he hated England –and he did, over and over again –only England could have made Crisp and The Naked Civil Servant.
So many lines in Philip Mackie’s superb screenplay for the Thames TV adaptation glitter like, well, the icy aphorisms that Crisp filled his eponymous autobiography with. But it was Hurt’s breakthrough performance as Crisp which is most historic: rendering Crisp, as Quentin himself acknowledged — and welcomed — something of an understudy to Hurt’s Crisp for the rest of his life.
The actual, quasi-existing Crisp, born Dennis Charles Pratt in Sutton, Surrey in 1908, sometimes sounded by this stage (he was nearly 70 when the drama aired) like a vintage car tyre losing air ve-ryslow-ly. And was almost as immobile. Hetero dandy Hurt injected a kind of rakishness – a hint of phallicism, even – to Crisp’s defiantly passsssive persssssona that came across rather more invigorating and sexy than he actually was. Hurt rendered Crisp rock ‘n’ roll when he probably wasn’t even up for a waltz. When Hurt repeatedly intoned Crisp’s Zen-like answer to the world and Other People and Desire in general – ‘If you like’ – it sounded slightly more aggressive than passive.
(And for me, Hurtian Crisp was further improved and made edgier by what I shall call Hoyleian-Hurtian Crisp: when I met the performance artist David Hoyle in the early 80s when we were both teenage runaways to London’s bedsit-land he would perform key moments from TNCS mid conversation about the weather or who was on Top of the Pops last night, adding a dash of David Bowie and Bette Davis to the mix. David always succeeded in making these impromptu excerpts sound as if they were flashbacks to his earlier life. Which, since he grew up a sensitive boy in working class Blackpool in the 1970s watching a lot of telly, they were.)
Gay porn star Kane O’Farrell’s swarthy Irishness (note his bricklayer’s physique, freckles and swim-trunk tan line) are offset by his gutsy inks and a cool neon-green light box in this new set of shots by photographer Pierre-Yves Monnerville.
Pierre-Yves says:
As you can see from my other series’, I like incorporating some light elements in the photos so I had this little structure built. In the future I’d like to further the idea and use different materials and colours as well. The model is Kane O’Farrell who did a couple of Colt movies and I’m glad he agreed to take part in this “green lit” figure study.
Kane O’Farrell is the star of films like Cross Country, Born to be Bad, Heaven to Hell and innumerable others, and he is taking a holiday at the moment and isn’t able to provide commentary on the photo shoot at this time.
About twenty more pics are after the jump and most show cock, so no, don’t click through if your boss is watching.
Abandoned by his parents, Xabi (Israel Rodríguez) has been in and out of kids homes since he was able to walk. He keeps going in after each increasingly bloody escape act - the last one ended when he almost burned a warden alive - and he’s now in a high-security correctional. Xabi and his buddy Joel (Hugo Catalán), a Mexican, reluctantly allow Driss (Mehroz Arif), a seventeen-year-old Moroccan they initially despise, to join them in their latest escape.
Once outside, they head to Madrid and separate. Xabi is anxious to track down his former lover Iñaki (Luis Hostalot), a middle-aged ETA senior operative he idolises, while Joel and Driss fall into the easy life with a couple of slaggy local girls. While he experiments with bomb building and waits for the elusive Iñaki to show up, Xabi turns a few tricks and steals a gun from Germán (Juan Luis Galiardo), a john who turns out to be an undercover cop.
A visit to Kenneth in the 212 introduced me to the wonderful Steve Hayes, the self-titled Tired Old Queen at the Movies who runs us through his favourite films from the Golden Age of Hollywood with breathtakingly erudite camp aplomb. I am not worthy of standing in Steve’s shadow, so I couldn’t help but share.
A plus is the very studly Johnny, who introduces each review and who films the subsequent magic which comes replete with Steve’s own, self-performed mini-theme song, delivered from what looks like his bathroom.
Mark Stout’s new exhibition will be featured at the D Squared Art Gallery, Denver Colorado, for the First Friday Art Walk February 5th.
Entitled “The Spirit of Man” the sensual collection features some of his top male fitness models.
Mark Stout has been referred to as “an internationally recognized and acclaimed fashion and fitness photographer” by Asian Photography Magazine. His work has appeared in Men’s Exercise, Exercise for Men, reFresh Magazine, Display Magazine and many others.
D Squared Gallery is located in the heart of the Santa Fe Arts District at 802 Santa Fe Dr, 2nd Floor. Denver, Colorado. The showing is from 6 to 9 pm.
A confessed truck-stop whore in his younger days, peerless photographer Joe Oppedisano has clearly never lost his love of the older, gruffer man and here’s cheers to that for it’s a love I share.
For example, it didn’t help that Sam Worthington spent most of the film in Na’vi blue, but all the way through Avatar I couldn’t wait for the action to return to fifty-something year old Stephen Lang, who played the gristly Colonel who fought off all opposition, including gravity which was vainly trying to put a sag on his sweaty, defiant hulkage (example pic at the end of this post).
The set of photos Joe sent over today are outtakes and re-touches of older shots of mostly older men that will be appearing in next month’s Junior magazine. Above is Geoff Allen, an interior designer and prop stylist with very beautiful forearms.
Sagitarrian gay porn star Vinnie D’Angelo (below) is actually five years younger than me - what is it about a mechanic’s body and a scowl that makes a man seem erotically ‘older’?
Enjoy the arduous trek around the commanding terrain of Lucasfilms’ Director of Development, Kumar Moghtader’s, magnificent chest:
The classic dialogue, transcripted below, comes out of Her mouth from 5:55 but the minutes leading up to that will fly by as She (as Katie Morosky) gingerly picks up the phone in the wee hours to call the unattainable straight dreamboat of her dreams (Robert Redford as Hubbell Gardner) weeping, begging him to come to her apartment and promising that she won’t touch him, beg him or embarrass him.
Then, Katie washes a handfull of dolls down with a tumbler of hard liquor that she treats like a glass of water.
Then, Katie delivers sentiments (with some tentative rebuttal from him) to which I, for one, can most certainly relate:
KATIE (desperately emotional): It’s because I’m not attractive enough- isn’t it. I’m not fishing, really - I’m not. I know i’m attractive, sort of. But, I’m not attractive in the … I’m not attractive in the right way, am I?
I mean, I don’t have the right style - for you, do I. Be my friend.
HUBBELL (sensing an out but feeling sorry for her): No, you don’t have the right style.
KATIE (pleading): I’ll change!
HUBBELL (consoling her while simultaneously consolidating his exit strategy): No! Don’t change. You’re your own girl you have your own style.
KATIE: But then I won’t have you! Why can’t I have you? Why?
*sigh* - despite it all, for many gays, it’s the way we are.
William Friedkin’s oft-maligned film from 1980 is a detective procedural/surrealist art-house hybrid that is unique and wonderful.
The film was partially inspired by the so-called bag murders of the 1970s where several gay men went missing and then dismembered parts of them with identifying tattoos and so on started appearing in black garbage bags in the Hudson River.
While in custody for killing his then-lover, gay film critic Addison Verrill, in 1977 by beating him in the head with a frying pan Paul Bateson, a radiology nurse, confessed to the bag murders, but he was never charged in relation to them. Friedkin visited Bateson in prison while developing Cruising, but they had met before, as Bateson created the brain scan images in Friedkin’s The Exorcist [more].
Here’s a grab of poster art from the film including a fabulous Japanese one, and there’s much more on Cruising in general, here.
Helen Mirren’s lovely coffee-table book, “In The Frame, My Life In Words and Pictures”, is full of lengthy anecdotes and fabulous photos from her private collections. After the obligatory toddler pics and stories about her anti-Czarist Russian father etc., the book launches into yet more interesting territory with Helen reflecting on and sharing candid pictures from her early days on the stage with a young Bob Hoskins (bald as a badger already in 1980, when they played together in The Duchess of Malfi) and getting trussed up into bondage gowns off the set of early Peter Greenaway films.
In a 22-page photo essay deep inside the book she introspects at length on her golden age, which started with her magnificent performance as Jane Tennison over several mini-seasons of Prime Suspect and climaxed in her getting made-up, coiffed and sewn into her Lacroix gown the day she won the Oscar for her over-rated performance in The Queen.
On page 187 she recounts how when she first arrived in Hollywood, she took an apartment in a building where Bette Davis lived in the penthouse. “One day,” Helen writes, “I was swimming in the pool and looked up to see that unmistakable head peering down to see who was splashing about”.
It’s just after this that she enters what she refers to as her “Brad Davis Years”, where she spent an extended period hanging with the other great B. Davis - my ultimate boyfriend and his wife Susan in their Hollywood bungalow, where Brad insisted all guests shed their clothes and spend some steamy time in his treasured back yard sauna, hence this spank-bank filling Polaroid generously shared by Helen on page 191:
(the writing on the wall is: how beautiful a day can be when kindness touches it)
The other great photo is after the jump, and shows Helen, Brad and Susan at a restaurant - look at Brad kicking back like a little champ in his emerald-coloured velour t-shirt with what looks like an empty bottle of Sangria on the table! *swoon*
Conrad (Matt Walton) owns a New York advertising agency. Recently single, his nights are filled with TV dinners and channel surfing. Bored, he calls an Australian hustler, Tyler (Sean Matic) and book him for an hour in-call. After some stilted small talk (see below), a joint and some sex which we never see, Tyler reveals that he’s hooking to save for his marriage to his girlfriend and their subsequent honeymoon.
Brandon quickly develops a crush and offers Tyler a one-thousand dollar a week office assistant/live-in fuck bag role, which cash-hungry Tyler instantly accepts. On the job, Tyler confronts hostility and justifiable jealousy and suspicion from Brandon’s creative team and, well, things kind of go nowhere but also off into all directions at once from this point as this already-woeful movie jumps aboard the Crapola Express to Shitville.
The film is short, thankfully, at 80 minutes but despite this it is so underdeveloped and anorexic that scenes are still slow, overlong, and repetitive. Production values seem to be a step or two above zero, but a low budget doesn’t mean that glitches such as mismatched eyesight lines, glaring breaks in continuity and an almost complete absence of narrative structure and flow in a straighty-180 narrative film are acceptable. You don’t need money to write, either (I can assure you of this) but ludicrous dialogue is the order of the day and exemplifies the film’s slapdash approach.
It would be hard not to swoon over anything featuring a shirtless Brad Davis, but while many feel it misrepresents the fact that Billy Hayes did have sex with men while in prison in Turkey, this divine sequence from the great Midnight Express is, for me, the most exquisitely erotic scene in cinema.
As Gina Gershon (as “Cristal Connors”) in Showgirls said, “it’s amazing what paint and a surgeon can do.”
Don’t know about any surgery here, but Academy-Award winning make up artist Trefor Proud does some extraordinary things with make up and wigs to transform Mitchell Rock and in the duo shots after the jump, Ben Patrick Johnson from wank-inducing studs to Cirque Noir clowns in this typically enthralling set from the great Eric Schwabel.
Director: Jonathan Demme
Stars: Tom Hanks, Antonio Banderas, Joanne Woodward
Available on DVD - order here
Philadelphia is a stellar pop-culture artefact. On the stand, Tom Hanks unbuttons his shirt to display his disfiguring KS lesions to the court. Antonio Banderas makes his Hollywood debut as Mother Earth, while hospital scenes are sprinkled with skeletal gay men dying in beanie-clad dignity. In other scenes, deities like Michael Callen and Quentin Crisp make cameos, and the costume party, where Hanks and Banderas dressed as sailors slow dance together, is as haunting and spectral as AIDS-kitsch gets. When Joanne Woodward, playing Hanks’ shattered but resolute mother, delivers the line “Honey, how are your platelets?” to her stricken son on the telephone, the film is jet propelled into vintage-classic territory.
However, though it is ostensibly – and quite famously – the film (up to that time) about homosexuality and AIDS, Philadelphia is neither directly about homosexuality or AIDS. At its core, Philadelphia is actually a well-disguised text about American attitudes to ethnic minorities.
With Colin Firth sure to be nominated for a Best Actor Oscar next month for his role in A Single Man, I thought it might be time to run a ‘All-Time Best Actor in a Gay Leading Role’ poll, based on the actors who scored a nomination or win over the years for playing a gay character.
Since I was born in 1972, I have no idea how to insert a button-poll into here, so if you’d like to vote for your favourite, you’re going to have to a place his name(s) in the comment stream below, and we’ll tally it up from there.
I do, however, have clips from each performance (where available - there’s trailers for Capote and Brokeback Mountain), so it should be just like watching the real Oscarcast!
A Single Man hasn’t been released in Australia yet, but the erudite Matthew Rettenmund, who’s based in New York, saw it and really loved it - Matthew’s review of the film is as thoughtful and entertaining as everything else he writes. His superb blog, BoyCulture, is named after his bestselling book that was made into a popular movie.
On the other hand, Matthew found the new Guy Ritchie film Holmes “headache-inducing” which doesn’t surprise me in the least. Guy Ritchie is head and shoulders above the pack of the world’s most hopeless and pointless film makers and he has not made a single film that has interested me in the slightest - most irritate me so much that they don’t make it too far beyond the opening credits before they get ejected from the DVD player.
Amid all the tumult of The Exorcist, there is a suggestion that Father Karras may have more on his mind than just his sick mother, but it’s his devoted colleague Father Dyer (who takes off Karras’ shoes when he has passed out in their shared room one night and later delivers him the Last Rites at the bottom of the Georgetown Steps*) who really steals the limelight in this fabulous party scene that is more famous for Linda Blair’s mood-killing appearance when she comes down from her bedroom and pisses all over the floor.
Enjoy the tension right through to 2:11, when Father Dyer (played by Reverend William O’Malley in his only film appearance) who has obviously had his night’s share of crème de menthe, jumps onto Ellen Burstyn’s piano and begins to entertain the stragglers not just with some upbeat tunes but with an all-time classic one liner.
Ever agreed with this sentiment:
“Listen! I don’t need any encouragement, but my idea of heaven is a solid white night club, with me as the head liner, for all eternity - and they love me!”
Maestro Eric Schwabel says that he’s a big fan of religious iconography, since it is one of the only places where painters and artists can “get paid vast sums to create images that border on insanity”.
This top shoot with porn star Nick Piston with make up by Trefor Proud was completed in 2008 but wasn’t published on Eric’s blog until this Christmas, as his festive season gift to art and cock lovers around the world.
Three more non-Schwabel shots of Nick Piston after the jump. Two are full nude with Nick’s beautiful fat cock at full strength - talk about Christ has risen!
Conner Habib is running off at the mouth again, fretting about the prospect of being laid off. Annoyed with his non-stop blathering, co-workers Girth Brooks and Colby Keller devise a scheme to shut him up! Another corker from Falcon.
It’s 2010 - the concept of taking full responsibility for your sex life is getting through even the thickest of gay skulls but Barbra, as usual, was way ahead of the game.
The ultimate motherfucker, Norman Bates debuted 50 years ago in Psycho (1960) a film that still, today, finds its only real competition in the three other films that came out of Alfred Hitchcock’s Navratilova-like run of form that started with Vertigo in 1958 and North by Northwest in 1959 and ended with The Birds in 1963.
My darling/s is/are back with a look at Bette Davis’ role in The Letter which Steve Hayes rightfully believes should have won Davis the 1940 Best Actress Oscar (which would have been her third). As always, Steve runs us through a kaleidoscopic mini-encyclopaedia on Davis and The Letter before dropping into character as Davis herself - it’s just great.
Born in London and renamed by Falcon Studios for what they mistakenly believed was his resemblance to Swedish tennis champion Bjorn Borg, Kristen Bjorn (pictured left) lived in Brazil, then Australia and is now based out of Spain. His (place)name-dropping body of work includes titles like Carnaval in Rio, Manhattan Latin, Montreal Men, The Caracas Adventure, The Vampire of Budapest, Hot Times in Little Havana and the Australian trilogy A Sailor in Sydney, Jackaroos and Manly Beach.
The classic dialogue, transcripted below, comes out of Her mouth from 5:55 but the minutes leading up to that will fly by as She (as Katie Morosky) gingerly picks up the phone in the wee hours to call the unattainable straight dreamboat of her dreams (Robert Redford as Hubbell Gardner) weeping, begging him to come to her apartment and promising that she won’t touch him, beg him or embarrass him.
With Colin Firth sure to be nominated for a Best Actor Oscar next month for his role in A Single Man, I thought it might be time to run a ‘All-Time Best Actor in a Gay Leading Role’ poll, based on the actors who scored a nomination or win over the years for playing a gay character.
